Computer systems have become pervasive in today's society. Although computer systems may provide many advantages that make work easier, computer systems often require maintenance. To assist in maintaining a computer system, infrastructure management tools are often employed. In some infrastructure management tools, an important aspect of infrastructure management is monitoring. Monitoring tools may try to detect errors in computer systems before they turn into problems and to react to possible problems before a customer experiences a problem and calls a help desk associated with the computer system.
In one monitoring system, an event may be generated for each monitored item that does not conform to established criteria. An event describes the specifics of the affected device, the reason for non-conformance, and additionally provides control information, such as severity, class, or the time that the problem was detected. The event information may be consolidated within an event manager. The event manager handles the display functions and processing of the events. One example of an event manager is the Tivoli Enterprise Console, available from Tivoli Systems of Austin, Tex.
The Tivoli Enterprise Console may handle all event processing for monitored devices and may present that information to monitoring operators. Conventionally, the monitoring operators assess all incoming events, investigate the possible causes, and apply proper correction procedures if necessary. If the monitoring operators decide that further escalation is necessary for an event or that other support groups need to be involved for solving the problem, then a help desk system may require the event information.
Help desk systems manage assignment of tasks related to solving various problems that may be experienced by a computer system. One example of a help desk system is ServiceCenter, available from Peregrine Systems, Inc. Although the Tivoli Enterprise Console and the ServiceCenter help desk each provide improvements to system management, the independent use of each of these creates several disadvantages. For example, events generated by the Tivoli Enterprise Console that require further assignment and escalation conventionally must be entered into the ServiceCenter help desk system manually. This procedure may retard or deter the overall problem solving process. In addition, in order to provide status tracking, an event identification number needs to be stored in each system. However, manual input of such an identification number may cause a considerable amount of overhead. Moreover, synchronization between the two management tools, which is desirable to provide the same problem information and event information to each management tool, cannot be readily achieved through separate use of each management tool because such synchronization may require help desk operators to have access to both management tools. Finally, manual integration of these two management tools could introduce typographical errors.